UNIMAGINABLE EXISTENCE I – A tale about Being born
Imagine you are (still) a fetus. Thinking that the world is like you, know and experience him at that time. How else could you imagine? You just awoke in this world, in this reality. You awoke by opening and discovering your senses, you are still dreaming and slowly, step-by-step you are becoming aware of things, of the world around you. Your experience does not reach beyond a warm mantle of water. Dim warmth enfolds you, you know yourself carried in a rolling, softly giving cover. Consciousness does not go beyond that. There is darkness, now and then a softly shining light. Vaguely soft rumors are heard. Voices and a murmuring sound of a heart. It is there, all around you. Things do not have names yet: there are no notions yet. You might think: “This is ít, this is the world, reality, so what will my existence be like.” How could you know better?
And you become attached to this world. With complete surrender you build roots of confidence and being in this world, in this living mantle of membranes and placenta. That is your safety and surety. That is where you find breath and nourishment, in here you exist, in here you root. A solid and safe base, ground under your feet. “Look at me, hanging on life-long cords” as the poet says. Imagine you are (still) a fetus and might think: “This is the way it is, this is the way it should be. This is life, existence; this is my reality, my world.”
And then ….! Then comes a moment that the ground of membranes and covers under your feet start to shake, start to fail, to give way! Once reliable and safe connections shift. Blood vessels are torn, breath is nearly taken away! That confident bag that carried you starts to (re)move you. You are driven out, out of your paradise, your foundations are faltering. The water that carried you all that time, that protected, fed and covered you, flows away. You are driven out! Out? To where? Is there an outside? There is no such thing as outside, there is no there, there is no other way of living, of being! It is UNIMAGINABLE that you could go on without that well-known world in which you awoke, that carried you and that you trusted! You are in pain, in distress, you are dying …!
But then….! The UNIMAGINABLE happens! At the end of a narrow, dark tunnel you live! It is possible! Air singes your lungs, but you can breathe. It is an unknown way of life. There is light and hard sounds, but also warm hands and arms that carry and comfort you. You also can eat and be fed: there is a warm breast where you can come home again.
Is it not the same kind of notion that hinders us to look over the frontier of our death now? How UNIMAGINABLE it is that we could survive without all this that represents our world, our current reality? This body, so familiar and a trusted house, all life long. This world in which I am safe and sure of my being alive. Could there be a somewhere else, a somehow else? An existence out there? It cannot exist, it is unimaginable.
Imagine you are fetus again, in this reality, in this world! That one day you might be born through a tunnel into another way of being, living on at the other side? The unimaginable as a possibility? Who knows, someone waiting for you in that other world? Are they aware of you during pregnancy?
Being born: dying out of the coherence and wholeness of our prenatal existence, coming from a there to a here. Dying: going away from here, being born in a there, on the other side? Being born and dying, two sides, two aspects of a similar, of the same motion?
JvdW